The Internet commerce technologies have significantly reduced sellers’ costs of collecting buyer preference information and managing multiple prices, enabling cost efficient custom product design and differentiated pricing. Advanced manufacturing technologies have also improved sellers’ manufacturing flexibility. We show that an early adopter of customization has a firstmover advantage, support...

Although there has been much debate about how it is implemented, case management is most often described as a 8.1.1 process to coordinate the often diverse and complex roles and responsibilities organisations have with a client. Elizabeth Moore defines it as: ’A set of logical steps and a process of interaction within a service network which assure that a client receives needed services in a su...

Electricity Market from economic, regulatory and engineering perspective is a very demanding system to control .There is requirement of provision of cost efficiency, lower impact of environment alongwith maintenance of security of supply for use of competition and regulation in the electricity market. Many countries due to failure of its system for adequately management of electricity companies...

Today's organizations, operating in an increasingly competitive conditions, are characterized by a network of relationships with suppliers and customers. Thus, the key resources, being a source of competitive advantage, are located not only within the organization but are part of network relationships. The most important task of managers is to achieve supply chain cost efficiency while maintain...

Considering cost-optimal heuristic search, we introduce the notion of global admissibility of a heuristic, a property weaker than standard admissibility, yet sufficient for guaranteeing solution optimality within forward search. We describe a concrete approach for creating globally admissible heuristics for domain independent planning; it is based on exploiting information gradually gathered by...

In today’s globally-leveled playing field, forces such as consumer activism, demographic change and technological evolution are forcing industry leaders to continuously evaluate their strategies to achieve or retain competitive advantage. These forces are even stronger in the manufacturing industry, and they are exacerbated by the unintended consequences of accelerating globalization. For insta...

Recent neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that human brain networks have economic small-world topology and modular organization, enabling efficient information transfer among brain regions. However, it remains largely unknown how the small-world topology and modular organization of human brain networks emerge and develop. Using longitudinal MRI data of 28 healthy pediatric subjects, collect...

The United States Postal Service (USPS) delivers more than 200 billion items per year. Transporting these items in a timely and cost-efficient way is a key issue if USPS is to meet its service and financial goals. The Highway Corridor Analytic Program (HCAP) is a tool that aids transportation analysts in identifying cost saving opportunities in the USPS surface transportation network. Use of th...

When adapting services in a SOA environment, not only the validity of the adapter may be of importance, but also non-functional properties like the costs of the adapter. We introduce an approach for finding cost-efficient adapters based on the operating guideline, which characterizes all valid adapters for the given services.

Merge-and-shrink (M&S) is a framework to generate abstraction heuristics for cost-optimal planning. A recent approach computes simulation relations on a set of M&S abstractions in order to identify states that are better than others. This relation is then used for pruning states in the search when a “better” state is already known. We propose the usage of simulation relations inside the M&S fra...